The Naked God - Faith

“Oh dear me. Is that finally a spike of fear I sense in your mind, Doctor? That has got to be the first arousal of any kind you’ve had for many a year. Perhaps it’s even a hint of remorse? Remorse for what you put me through.”

“You put yourself through it, Jacqueline. We asked you to cooperate; you were the one who chose to refuse. Very bluntly, as I recall.”

“Not guilty. You tortured me.”

“Kate Morley. Maynard Khanna. Should I go on?”

She stood directly in front of the desk, staring at him. “Ah. Two wrongs making a right? Is that what I’ve reduced you to, Doctor? Fear does things to the most brilliant of minds. It makes them desperate. It makes them pitiful. Is there any other excuse you’d like to offer?”

“If I was facing a jury, good and true, I could offer several justifications. Such arguments would be wasted on a bigot.”

“Petty, even for you.”

“Cooperate with us. It’s not too late.”

“Not even clichйs change in five hundred years. That says quite a lot about the human race, don’t you think? Certainly everything I need to know.”

“You’re transferring onto an abstract concept. Self-hatred is a common aspect of a diseased mind.”

“If I’m the one that’s ill and incapable, how come you’re the one in terminal trouble?”

“Then stop being the problem, and help us with a solution.”

“We are not problems .” Her hand slammed down on the front of the desk, making the two coffee cups jump. “We are people. If that simple fact could ever register in that fascist bitek brain of yours then you might be able to look in a different direction, one that would help bring an end to our suffering. But that is beyond you. To think along those lines you have to be human. And after all these weeks of study, the one definite conclusion I have come to, is that you are not human. Nor can you ever become human. You have nothing, no moral foundation from which to grow out of. Laton and Hitler were saints compared to you.”

“You’re taking your situation far too personally. Understandably, after all, you can hardly retreat from it. You lack the courage for that.”

“No.” She straightened up. “But I can make my last noble stand. And depriving the Confederation Navy of your so-called talent will be a satisfactory achievement for me. Nothing personal, you understand.”

“I can put an end to this, Jacqueline. We’re so very close to an answer now.”

“Let’s see how your rationality endures the reality of the beyond. You will now experience every facet of it. Being possessed by one of its inhabitants; living within it, and if you’re really fortunate, as a possessor, forever terrified that some lucky living bastard is going to rip you out of your precious new prize and send you back screaming. What will your answer be then, I wonder?”

“Unchanged.” He gave her a sad defeated smile. “It’s called resolution, the ability and determination to see things through to the end. However unexpected or disappointing that end turns out to be. Not that anyone will ever know now. But I held true to myself.”

Alarmed by his mind tone, Jacqueline started to point her right arm. Slivers of white fire licked up from her wrist.

In Gilmore’s mind the alternatives were stark. That she would torture him was inevitable. He would be possessed, or more likely damaged so badly that his body died, banishing his soul to the beyond. That was where logic broke down. He believed, or thought he did, that there was a way out of the beyond. Doubt undermined him, though. Factious, unclean human emotion, the type he hated so. If a way through the beyond existed, why did the souls remain trapped? There was no certainty any more. Not for him, not there. And he couldn’t stand that. Facts and rationality were more than the building blocks of his mind, they were his existence. If the beyond was truly a place without logic, then Pierce Gilmore had no wish to exist there. And his own sacrifice would advance human understanding by a fraction. Such knowledge was a fitting last thought.

He datavised the processor array for the latest version of the anti-memory. Jacqueline’s hand was already lining up desperately on him when the desktop AV projection pillar silently pumped a blindingly pervasive red light across the office.

Sixty minutes later Murphy Hewlett and his squad blew the office door out with an EE charge, and rushed in to the rescue. They found Gilmore slumped over his desk, and Kate Morley lying on the floor in front of it. Both of them were alive, but completely unresponsive to any kind of stimulus the squad medic could apply. As Murphy said later during his debriefing, they were nothing but a pair of wide awake corpses.

Chapter 04

From the safety of the little plateau, a quarter of the way up the northern endcap, Tolton trained his telescope on the lobby of the Djerba starscraper. Another swirl of darkness was pushing up through the dome of white archways. Pieces of the structure tumbled across the crumpled lawn circling the forlorn building. He kept expecting to hear the sound of breaking glass reach across the distance. The telescope provided a good, sharp image, as if he was just a few metres away. He shivered at that errant thought, still able to feel the wave of coldness that had swept through him every time the flying monster passed overhead.

“This one’s a walker.” He moved aside and let Erentz use the telescope’s eyepiece.

She studied it for a minute. “You’re right. It’s picking up speed, too.” The visitor had shoved its way through the smouldering ruins of the shanties, leaving a deep furrow in its wake. Now it was traversing the meadows beyond. The wispy pink grass stalks around it turned black, as if they’d been singed. “Moving smoothly enough; fast, too. It should reach the southern endcap in five or six hours at that rate.”

Just what we need,the personality groused. Another of the buggers leeching off us. We’ll just have to reduce nutrient fluid production to survival minimum, keep the neural strata alive. That’ll play hell with our main mitosis layer. It’ll take us years to regenerate the damage.

Eight of the dire visitors had now emerged from the Djerba, three of them taking flight. Without fail, they had headed for the southern endcap, just as the first and largest had done. Those that moved over the land had left a contrail of dead vegetation behind them. When they reached the endcap, they bored their way through the polyp and into the arteries which fed the giant organs, suckling the nutrient fluid.

“We should be able to burn them out soon,” she said. “The flame throwers and incendiary torpedoes are coming on fine. You’ll be okay.”

The look Tolton gave her made his lack of affinity irrelevant. He bent over the telescope again. The visitor was crunching its way through a small forest. Trees swayed and toppled, broken off at the base. It seemed incapable of going round anything. “That thing is goddamn strong.”

“Yeah.” Her worry was pronounced.

“How’s the signal project coming?” He asked the question several times every day, frightened he might miss out on some amazing breakthrough.

“Most of us are working on developing and producing our weapons right now.”

“You can’t give up on that. You can’t!” He said it loud for the benefit of the personality.

“Nobody’s giving up. The physics core team is still active.” She didn’t tell him it was down to five theorists who spent most of their time arguing about how to proceed.

“Okay then.”

Two more are approaching,the personality warned.

Erentz gave the street poet a swift glance. He was engrossed with the telescope again, tracking the movements of the visitors still loose on the grass plains. No need to panic the others.

Quite.

The creatures had been arriving at the rate of nearly one every half hour ever since Erentz’s disastrous foray into the Djerba. The personality was now worried about its ability to maintain the habitat’s environmental integrity. Each new arrival invariably smashed its way into a starscraper, then proceeded to hammer the tower’s internal structure. So far the emergency inter-floor pressure seals had held. But if the invasion continued at this